SageCon Invasives Initiative: Hot on the Horizon in Oregon’s Rangelands
The wildfire and invasive fuels problem will not be solved in silos around the West. The Oregon-based Sage-Grouse Conservation Partnership (known as SageCon) launched its Invasives Initiative to strategically link local and regional invasive grass efforts.
The Boxcar Fire in 2018 burned over 100,000 acres near Maupin, OR. Photo Courtesy of Bing Bingham.
“Working with noxious weeds is like a bare-knuckled bar brawl. Some years you gain ground, others you get beat, but you need to get back in there.”
With cheatgrass settled in, new invasives arriving, and with the worst wildfire days ahead it’s easy to feel under attack on today's high desert. Complete eradication of invasive weeds is nearly impossible and yet control is essential as biodiversity, local livelihoods, and long-term productivity of the land are all at stake.
Oregon’s SageCon Invasives Initiative is working with landowners and the public, private and non-governmental partners to better coordinate and scale up actions on the ground.
Fires have burned more than three million acres of Oregon rangelands since 2000, including large areas of important sage-grouse core habitat and several places with multiple re-burns due to invasive annual grass fuels.
Oregon’s Wildfire AND Invasives: A Devastating Tag-team
Mega-fires like Oregon saw in 2012 and 2014 were historically rare in sagebrush rangelands. But large amounts of highly flammable invasive grass fuel are now present throughout much of the landscape. Under dry and windy conditions, rangeland fires fueled by invasives can travel up to 14 miles per hour, putting lives, infrastructure, livestock, and wildlife at risk. According to vegetation composition maps of Oregon rangelands, an estimated 5.1 million acres are moderately to severely invaded by annual grasses, with millions more acres at risk. There are 2.9 million of those invaded acres located in watersheds identified with a high likelihood of wildfire in a 2019 wildfire risk assessment for the Pacific Northwest. Adjacent to these invaded areas are remaining intact areas of healthy vegetation and habitat at risk of further expansion of invasive species. If not addressed, the vicious cycle of annual grass invasion and wildfire will continue to spread across the landscape, reducing the sustainability of ranching communities, impacting recreation and tourism, and destroying wildlife habitat for many species.
Ashwood-Antelope RFPA volunteers managing a controlled burn. Photo Courtesy of Bing Bingham.
The year 2012 saw over one million acres of Oregon’s sagebrush habitat burn in less than a month, followed by another 500,000+ acres in 2014. More recently, and unlike the experience of its neighboring states, the area of Oregon rangelands burned since 2014 has been much lower, coinciding with a renewed focus on sagebrush ecosystem health, sage-grouse, and wildfire protection operations. The year 2015 marked the most recent federal Endangered Species Act listing review for sage-grouse and the State’s corresponding release of its Sage-Grouse Action Plan. There were also important decisions to turn up the investments in Oregon’s Rangeland Fire Protection Associations (RFPAs). There were also concurrent increases in RFPA volunteer numbers, activity, and collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the vast majority of Oregon’s public rangelands.
Through increased focus on initial attack, RFPA fire operations have been effective in activating response capacity--paired with a few years of good luck in weather and wind, Oregon has seen recent declines in rangeland fires. However, one thing remains clear; though burned acreage has decreased, fuel levels have not.
Local and Landscape Level Stakes
Sagebrush rangelands cover approximately one-third of Oregon and support rural communities and ranching operations, wildlife habitat for an estimated 350 species, limitless horizons, and scenic beauty, and recreation across millions of acres. This sagebrush ecosystem is increasingly at risk from invasive annual grasses that aggressively invade and replace native species. Invaded communities lose the quality of habitat for wildlife, reduce the amount of reliable year-round forage for livestock, and increase the chances of large wildfires. These invasive annual grasses also benefit from fire and increasingly replace native vegetation through a cycle of expanding invasion and repeated wildfire. This is not just an Oregon story but one that is remaking the face of the American West.
“To be effective we need to better understand the distribution of these invasive weeds so core habitat areas can be protected. By keeping the invasive weeds from becoming established or at low populations, flattening the invasion curve makes the best use of limited available funding.”
To combat invasive species, a wide range of partners have been applying herbicide treatments to reduce invasive grass cover and re-seeding invaded areas with perennial grasses in an effort to improve rangeland conditions. Invasive-focused projects have included large treatment areas following wildfires, managed grazing and treatments that span land ownership boundaries, and use of technology and research to improve restoration success. Though many projects have been completed on the ground, partners know the pace and scale of invasive expansion is such that these efforts are not keeping up.
The SageCon Partnership Invasives Initiative
Sage-grouse narrowly averted an Endangered Species Act listing in 2015. The iconic bird of the West is dependent on intact sagebrush ecosystems and continues to be negatively impacted by both invasive grasses and large fires. The SageCon Partnership formed in 2012 in order to advance a state-based, collaborative response to the potential ESA listing decision that rests upon a landscape-scale approach across ownership boundaries. That response takes the form of the Oregon Sage-Grouse Action Plan and plans from federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, local county planning, as well as voluntary landowner commitments. SageCon uses collaborative governance structures and working groups networked into local capacity in order to promote continued coordination around implementation.
The urgency of the invasive annual grass problem and what’s at stake led SageCon to launch an Invasives Initiative to strategically address the invasive annual grass threat in Oregon rangelands through a coordinated, cross-boundary approach that prioritizes efforts, amplifies what’s working, fills gaps, and addresses barriers to reducing invasive species and increasing rangeland health. The Initiative involves a diverse range of partners, including federal and state agencies, local weed management entities, tribes, researchers, conservation and ranching interests, and state’s sage-grouse Local Implementation Team leads.
The spread of invasive annual grass species has affected broad areas of sagebrush rangeland in Oregon. The map on the left shows annual grass & forb cover from 1984-1988 and the map on the right shows annual grass & forb cover from 2015-2019. Source: Rangeland Analysis Platform, 2020. Areas shown in white are non-rangeland vegetation (forest, agriculture, playa, etc).
Following the lead of the Idaho Cheatgrass Challenge and other regional efforts, SageCon is adopting the strategy of “Defend the Core, Grow the Core, Mitigate Impacts”. This strategy is based on a landscape-wide view that acknowledges that the most effective strategy for tackling invasives emphasizes proactive management in areas that are still relatively intact and dominated by native species, or “core”. Of highest priority is defending these intact areas by keeping invasives out using widely accepted techniques such as Early Detection and Rapid Response (EDRR), with relatively minimal cost and effort. From there, growing the core into adjacent invaded areas strategically increases the large blocks of intact habitat across broadening areas. In addition, mitigating impacts of invasion and frequent wildfire in highly invaded areas will continue to occur where needed. This strategy is designed to increase the awareness of the issue and encourage proactive, strategic, landscape-scale efforts.
The SageCon Invasives Initiative is organized around the following priority focal areas led by working groups representing multiple partner organizations:
Geographic strategy: Central to the Invasives Initiative is the development of a geographic strategy to identify opportunity areas on the landscape and prioritize efforts. Oregon is developing a geographic strategy map that identifies intact, transitioning, and invaded areas, which will be used to communicate the landscape-scale vision of the Initiative and support locally-led coordination and project implementation.
Funding: Given the vast scale of the problem, funding for invasive annual grass work has been continually low, particularly for some of the interventions that are most successful (e.g., EDRR). This group is working to increase the level of investment in the invasive annual grass and wildfire problem; improve the coordination and leveraging of dollars across state, federal and local levels; and advance funding toward strategic, landscape-scale, cross-boundary projects.
Grazing flexibility: The most common barrier to invasive annual grass management cited by SageCon partner interviewees was the lack of adequate flexibility to manage livestock for improved rangeland conditions. This group is working to advance actions that provide livestock operators more flexibility to rest certain areas when needed for rangeland health (e.g., post-wildfire and drought response, required grazing rest for restoration projects) as well as actions where range management can address situations of excess forage (and excess fuel for wildfire).
In addition to the three primary focal areas, the SageCon Invasives Initiative is also tracking work in related areas, including seed technology improvement, native plant material development (involving farmers, ranchers, tribes and others), and local capacity-building. While workgroups do not yet exist tied to these specific areas, by tracking them intentionally, the Initiative intends to be poised to amplify, assist and integrate opportunities.
For more information, visit the SageCon Partnership website or reach out to our SageCon Partnership Team:
Brett Brownscombe, SageCon Partnership Project Manager (brownscombe@pdx.edu)
Megan Creutzburg, SageCon Partnership Technical Coordinator (Megan.Creutzburg@oregonstate.edu)
Julia Babcock, SageCon Partnership Project Communications Coordinator (jjb@pdx.edu)
Jennah Stillman, SageCon Partnership Project Associate (jennah@pdx.edu)